Lean startup — 5 years on… — Startup R&D Lab

medium.com – Lean startup promised us so much, but failed many to such epic proportions, so I wanted to reflect on the whole doctrine 5 years since the book took the industry by storm.

2010 was a great year. It was the year I spent running around spending money I had ‘borrowed’ from my father to build a technology company. This was peak Facebook hype — I was convinced I could raise millions by the end of the year and be a billionaire the next.

Tutorwall was the name of my startup. I hired twin brothers who ran a dev shop out of their apartment in Ilford (Just outside of London, UK). I would design the system and they would start building features. I picked every feature that could potentially add value to my intended users while browsing popular sites. At first, it looked like a mix of Facebook, Quora, and Amazon, then slowly evolved to look a lot like a competitor tutor matching site that had raised $1m in New York…